Touched Page 19

  JoHanna sat down in the sand and eagerly pulled off her shoes, and I followed suit.

  “Floyd?”

  Duncan looked up at him while he still balanced her on her feet.

  “Are we gonna swim?” He looked at JoHanna.

  “Let’s see Duncan walk first,” JoHanna hedged. She stood up and unfastened her skirt. She must have felt my gaze on her because she looked down at me and laughed as she stepped out of the skirt and left it billowing in the sand. “My slip is perfectly presentable. I advise you to do the same,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse.

  I didn’t move at all as she shook it down her arms and let it fall beside her skirt. The camisole she wore was fringed with white lace and tiny pink embroidered roses, the same lace and roses that edged her slip. Cotton. They fluttered in the breeze from the river.

  “Don’t be a dunderhead, Mattie. Get comfortable. It’s the river!” Duncan’s voice teased me, and I looked up to see that she was in her underpants, her own dress left at Floyd’s feet. The thought that he might drop his pants sent a flush of heat to my face, and I quickly looked away.

  “When it’s just me and Mama, we get naked.” Duncan was teasing me, but I knew it was true. Floyd was completely unaffected by the idea.

  It struck me that perhaps they were all truly innocent and I was the one tainted by sin. Maybe I’d heard too many times how indulging in some harmless pleasure, like feeling the sun and water on my skin, would lead to something else. Beneath my lowered brow, I studied JoHanna as she left me to go to Duncan and scoop her up into the air, twirling her around and around until they both sank into the hot, white sand, laughing. There was no harm in what they did. No harm in the way Floyd smiled down at them, happy at their pleasure. The wrong was in my own sense of shame, that I could not enjoy an innocent action.

  My fingers moved to the buttons on my blouse, but there they stopped. I could go no further. A terrible reality struck me so that my hand faltered and fell to my lap like a blasted dove. Duncan, Floyd, even JoHanna, were innocent. I was not. First at the hands of Elikah, and then with my own decision, I had stepped beyond innocence. I knew things that I had never wanted to learn, and I was forever changed. I could not risk dropping my dark skirt. I could not be certain that I had not bled. I was not a carefree mother frolicking with my daughter. My child would never stand in the hot sand beside a river.

  JoHanna started toward me, then stopped. I saw my pain was reflected in her eyes as she looked at me. Unable to help me, she spared me and turned to Duncan, holding out her arms. “Can you walk to me?” she asked her.

  Duncan’s smile turned into a frown of concentration. As Floyd held her steady by her shoulders, she clenched her jaw and stared down at her right foot. “Move,” she commanded.

  Her leg trembled, but it did not inch forward as it had the day before.

  “Move!” Duncan’s voice cut into the sounds of the woods, and for an instant the small thrush’s moving about in the underbrush ceased. Pecos, pecking away at the edge of the water, lifted his head and froze.

  Duncan lifted her face to her mother, and I saw that her eyes held dread. “Mama …”

  JoHanna smiled. “It’s okay, Duncan. You walked yesterday. You’ll walk again.”

  “Mama!” Duncan’s eyes darkened, and without any warning she lifted her fist and crashed it into her right thigh. “Damn you!” She lifted her hand again but Floyd was quicker and caught it before she could strike herself. She struggled to free her hand as JoHanna ran across the sand toward her.

  “Duncan.” JoHanna scooped her into her arms. “Oh, Duncan.”

  “I thought I could do it. I knew I could.” Duncan was heaving with sorrow, but she was not crying. “I hate my legs! I hate them. They won’t work anymore, and I’m sick of being carried around like a baby. I want to run! I want to dance!”

  I sat in the sand, not knowing what to do. Floyd stood over them, as helpless as I. It was Pecos that sounded the alarm. Feathers bristling, he half ran and half flew from the water’s edge back toward the green tunnel where the path to the road lay. I looked up to see a tall, darkly handsome man standing just hidden by the woods.

  John Doggett walked across the sand toward JoHanna and Duncan. Ignoring Pecos as if he didn’t exist, he gave me a nod and Floyd a smile, but JoHanna was his destination, and he never slowed a step in reaching her. Kneeling down beside her in the sand he looked at Duncan.

  “There are some things you can do in the water that will strengthen your legs. The muscles are there. They’ve been asleep, and yesterday you woke them up rather abruptly.”

  His voice was strong and clear and soothing. Duncan lifted her angry face to him. Her mouth opened to speak, something angry, I could tell. But nothing came out, and the pain faded from her features.

  JoHanna did not turn to face him. She reached down and placed her palm on Duncan’s face.

  “May I take her into the water and show her some exercises?”

  “JoHanna has already done that. We’re not getting in the water today.” I spoke as I stood. My intent was to go and get JoHanna’s clothes and hand them to her, but at the last minute I couldn’t bring myself to do that. JoHanna finally looked at me, and surely she saw the consternation in my face, because she shook her head. A gentle gesture, but one I saw clearly.

  “What exercises?” Duncan’s fury was spent. Her frustration had faded with the hope of help.

  “Kicking, lifting. The current can help you do the movement, and at the same time the weight of the water forces the muscles to work.” He spoke to Duncan as if she were an adult. “I’m sure Floyd will help me so that your mother feels you’re safe enough.”

  “JoHanna has already said we’re not going in the water today.” I closed the distance between us, circling around so that I went up on Floyd’s side where I could face JoHanna and John Doggett.

  “Mattie …” JoHanna looked confused. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I looked at JoHanna, ignoring Doggett as he stared at me, as if he were putting the pieces of me together and I wasn’t a very difficult puzzle. He wasn’t upset at my harsh tone. It was more as if he were curious about why I was reacting so strongly to a simple offer of help. I spoke to JoHanna. “You said you didn’t want to get in the river, remember?” I felt my courage slipping. I wanted to remind her of the dream again, but Duncan was listening.

  “We’ll hold her tight,” Floyd assured me. “I’ll never let her slip.” He smiled down at Duncan. “Want to do it?”

  “Sure.” Duncan held out her arms to him.

  Floyd lifted her up, slipping out of his shoes as he started walking toward the river. John Doggett stood up and joined them, hopping on first one foot and then the other as he drew his boots off with two long, smooth pulls that tightened the shirt across his back.

  “JoHanna!” I spoke her name in an urgent whisper. “You don’t know a thing about that man. You’ve let him take Duncan.” I still couldn’t believe what was happening. I looked around for the rooster. Even Pecos wasn’t doing his job. He’d given his flap of warning and made a run at Doggett, but he’d turned back to pecking at the drying mussel shells in a patch of dark clay.

  “No,” JoHanna said, her gaze on the three at the lip of yellow water. “I let Floyd take her. John Doggett is just a bit of lagniappe.”

  “He could be a killer.”

  JoHanna’s smile was bemused, but she didn’t look at me. “No, he’s just a man with excellent timing and a bit of kindness toward a little girl.”

  “What makes you think he knows anything about helping her legs?”

  JoHanna finally looked at me. “It doesn’t matter what he knows or doesn’t know, Mattie. What matters is that Duncan believes he can help her. She was about to give up. If she quits trying, she’ll never walk again. What he gave her was a new hope. Some bit of magic to keep her going.”

  I snorted. “Duncan wasn’t going to give up. She’s just frustrated.”

  I half expected my pe
rsistence would make JoHanna angry, but it didn’t. She gave me a look filled with what seemed to be pride. “Little Mattie, the briar.” She stood up and started toward the river.

  “I’m not thorny.” Her words stung me.

  She turned back toward me, the sun directly overhead, and I realized for the first time that though I’d seen her shorn head and had grown used to it, John Doggett had not, yet he had not even glanced at her. “A briar has more than thorns, Mattie, but you have a few of those, too. It’s a quality of survival.” She laughed as she turned back to the river and took those long, long strides until she had joined the group in the waist-deep current.

  Twenty

  I SAT in the sand for half an hour, until the dark folds of my skirt had turned into an oven. Not even pulling the material up enough to reveal my calves was any real measure of relief. For the first twenty minutes I’d watched Doggett like a hawk, but his attention was on Duncan. He held her in the water on his hands and urged her to kick. A time or two he lowered her enough in the water so that she floated on her own. As far as I could tell, he paid no attention to JoHanna, though her slip was now wet and melded to her body.

  It gave me a chance to ponder her, though. She was forty-eight, well into middle age. She had not gone to fat as many women had. The mark of her years was in the slight droop of her breasts, the bit of extra flesh at her thighs. If her waist had thickened, it was still small enough, and firm. Her arms, where most women age first, were long and slender. Graceful. She reached and lifted and held and motioned with the fluidness of a young girl. Vital. I smiled at the word. JoHanna McVay was vital. Perhaps that was the secret of her youth.

  She gave no more attention to Doggett than she did to Floyd, but she laughed with both men while Duncan fought against the weight of the water with a grim determination that I recognized as fear. JoHanna knew her daughter well. Duncan was afraid she’d never walk. That confidence she spouted had been for JoHanna’s benefit. And mine. And Will’s. And Floyd’s. For herself, Duncan feared the worst.

  The thought of Will gave me a feeling of uneasiness. What would he say to the spectacle of his wife in the river in her underclothes with two handsome men, one of them definitely virile? But JoHanna was so natural, so completely at ease, surely she was not doing anything that Will would object to. She loved her husband.

  In contrast to Doggett, Floyd’s childlike nature had never been more obvious. He’d instantly assumed the role of servant to the master, doing whatever Doggett told him to do. And Doggett gave his orders guised in a silky tone, a voice that told Floyd how much he was helping even as it set out the task—to lift Duncan’s leg, to support her head. Doggett was a man who’d learned to get his way, from whoever crossed his path.

  I felt a ticklish presence at my elbow and looked over to find Pecos standing beside me, his feathers just grazing my arm. His beady gaze was fastened on the scene at the river, and I felt an unexpected kinship with the bird. He didn’t like Doggett either.

  The hot and glaring sun had given me a headache, and my heavy breakfast had consolidated to lead. I knew that I had to get up, to move, to find some relief from the hot sun and my worries over the scene before me. As I put my hands behind me to push up, JoHanna swung around suddenly in the water and stared at me.

  “It’s time for lunch,” she said, wading out of the water, her slip clinging to her stomach and hips and thighs. Laughing, she ran across the sand to me and lifted her slip. She twisted it in her hands and the cool water cascaded down on top of my head. I wanted to be angry, but the water felt good, and JoHanna’s face was alive with joy. She leaned down to me.

  “She moved her legs strongly. They’re coming back to life.” She placed her palm on my forehead, concern darkening her eyes. “You’re too hot, Mattie. I shouldn’t have left you in the sun.” She stood up. “Floyd!”

  “I can get up.” I shook my head at Floyd as he came out of the water, Duncan in his arms. At least she hadn’t called Doggett to assist me.

  JoHanna’s hand on my arm steadied me, and Pecos served as my guard as I walked across the hot sand back to the beckoning green of the woods. It was amazing. As we stepped beneath the boughs of a huge water oak laced with the sinuous coils of a wild wisteria, the temperature dropped at least ten degrees. The thick foliage blocked the white hot glare of the sun, and I forced my forehead to relax. The relief was in stant. My headache began to clear, my stomach to settle.

  “Mattie, you could have had a heat stroke sitting out there in that dark skirt, and with no hat.” JoHanna’s voice was half rebuke at me and half criticism of herself. “I thought we both had more sense.”

  Why hadn’t I gotten up and moved to the shade? I wasn’t an idiot. I’d spent my entire life in Mississippi and knew the dangers of the sun. I touched the top of my head and felt the heat. My part would be sunburned, as would my face. The fact was annoying, but not a tragedy. I’d been sunburned before and had the freckles to prove it.

  Floyd ran back to the river and retrieved the jug of tea he’d anchored in the deep, cool water, and we sat down to eat again. My breakfast was still with me, but I knew if I didn’t make a small effort to eat, JoHanna would get even more upset. I took the sandwich wrapped in a beautiful cloth napkin and the glass of tea Floyd poured and settled back against the trunk of a magnolia grandiflora. When I’d first arrived in Jexville I’d seen the last blooms of the season on such a tree in Jeb Fairley’s yard. They were at least a foot wide with a scent of lemony heaven. Jeb had seen my interest and told me that one touch on the vanilla white petals would turn them brown. Delicate. A symbol of Southern womanhood, he’d said. But then Jeb was an old-style gentleman and not one given to beating his wife.

  Elikah rose up before me, a specter of fear and longing. I sipped the sweet tea and tasted the bitterness of my marriage, of what I had become because of it. What had gone wrong? As everyone remarked, he was a handsome man. Not like Will. Elikah suffered from a streak of vainness that Will didn’t possess, and a big helping of cruelty. I had wanted so much to love him. In the first days of my marriage, I had thought it was possible. I looked down at the sandwich in my hand and slowly began to unwrap it, watching JoHanna through the safety of my eyelashes. I wanted what she and Will had together. I wanted to laugh with my husband, to play and love and talk. To start a child that would be wanted and loved.

  “Mattie, are you going to eat?”

  Duncan’s question snapped my head up, and I found that everyone was staring at me. I unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite, forcing myself to chew and swallow, aided with a swig of tea.

  “Why don’t you tell us a story, Floyd?” JoHanna said, drawing the attention off me. She’d settled against a sweet gum and was chewing one of the twigs, her own sandwich half eaten in her lap. In truth, we’d all overindulged at breakfast. Only Floyd and Duncan, who was too young to ever completely fill, were hungry. Doggett was eating a ham sandwich at a leisurely pace.

  “Maybe John would know a story.” Duncan’s bright eyes dared him to rise to the challenge. “Floyd’s the best storyteller in Chickasaw County. Mattie’s pretty good, too.”

  Doggett’s smile was slow. “I know a few stories. But I don’t claim to be any storyteller.”

  How cunning he was. He’d said he was a writer. Of course he could tell a tale. Why was he pretending to such modesty? I shifted my sandwich into my lap and tore off some bread for Pecos. The bird and I were developing a stronger and stronger link. He didn’t threaten Doggett, but he wasn’t having anything to do with the man.

  Like me, he watched.

  Doggett turned into my stare, his smile holding but his brow furrowing for a brief few seconds. “I do know a story about the river,” he said. “It’s been handed down from my people.”

  “The Indians, the Irish, or the barbarians?” I snapped out the question.

  JoHanna stopped chewing and stared at me, but she left Doggett to handle the situation on his own.

  “The Indians,” he said in t
hat soft, composed voice of his. “The Pascagoulas. They left little behind but their legends and burial mounds. The white man drove them west on the Trail of Tears, those he didn’t murder outright.”

  Even though I was girded against him, his sad anger touched my heart. The story of the Indians wasn’t written in any history book. For the Seminoles and Choctaws and Creeks, their entire history was condensed to a paragraph or two on “first settlers of the area,” or a single phrase, “filthy Indians.” The campaigns to eradicate them were not taught to young children. But I’d seen them first hand in Meridian, which wasn’t far from Philadelphia, where the remnants of a tribe had been herded up on a reservation. They were a people without a past or a future. What they’d once been, the white man had eradicated. What they might have been was forbidden by law. Indians did not have a tenth the rights or power of the negroes.

  “It’s a story about this river?” Duncan had scooted forward in JoHanna’s arms until she sat on her own, only a few feet from the tips of John Doggett’s booted feet. I noticed again how handsome the boots were, if only they were brushed and polished. The design sewn into the vamps looked to be some type of leather I’d never seen. It was the only scrap of vanity I could find about the man, and after paying for rare boots, he didn’t care for them properly. Perhaps they’d been stolen off a dead body. The satisfaction of that thought made me smile.

  “Well, I think Mattie is ready now.” Doggett lifted an eyebrow at me, and I felt a chill travel down my arms. I wasn’t afraid of him. But he was like a snake. Beautiful, mesmerizing, and very likely deadly. Still, I couldn’t deny his charm. He didn’t have to touch me for me to feel him.

  “Back many years ago when the moon shone only on the red skins of my people, there was a beautiful Indian princess by the name of Anola. Her father was the mighty ruler of the fierce Biloxi tribe.”

  Doggett was no storyteller. He was a poet. His voice was an instrument that set the melody; his words the lyrics. He pulled and tugged at me, drawing me close to his warmth. I forced myself to look around and saw that he was having the same effect on everyone there. Even Pecos seemed lulled into a stupor.